Research On The Impact Of Leadership Style On Employees' Voice Behavior

The fierce global competition, updated technology and turbulent environment have put forward new demands on the organizations'adaptability and flexibility. In order to keep sustainable competitiveness, the organizations need to change their improper regulations and keep exploring new development plans and original ideas. As a result, it's not enough to depend only on the management team to solve all the problems, more and more organizations begin to realize the importance of employees' constructive suggestion.Voice behavior is a change-oriented extra-role behavior that employees express work-related ideas and opinions or propose constructive suggestions towards leaders or colleagues to reduce decision mistakes, advance the working process and improve the organizations'status quo. Voice behavior has two dimensions, namely promotive voice behavior and prohibitive voice behavior. Promotive voice behavior means proposing new ideas or constructive suggestions to improve organization processes; and prohibitive voice behavior means pointing out problems in working places to reduce factors that impede organization efficiency. The attitude of voice behavior is quite complicated and vague, leading to the passive and failure of employees' intention to voice.Leadership style is a key factor that influencing employees'voice behavior. On one hand, leaders are the main objects that employees voice to; on the other hand, leaders dominate the resources and control the rights to reward or punish, and also shaping the organizational culture and voice atmosphere. At present, there are some researches about the impact of leadership traits to employees' voice behavior, but not much systematically study the relationship between leadership style and voice behavior. So this study focuses on voice behavior, builds up the research framework on the basis of incentives theory and social exchange theory, and explores the impact of transformational leadership, transactional leadership and laissez-faire leadership on employees'voice behavior and its two dimensions, and also verifies the mediation of psychological empowerment and moderation of exchange ideology. The main conclusions are as follows:Firstly, Voice behavior in China context has two dimensions, namely promotive voice behavior and prohibitive voice behavior. Demographic characteristics such as gender, age, education, working years and corporation type don't have impact on voice behavior and its'two dimensions, but position grade is positively related with voice behavior and its'two dimensions.Secondly, transformation leadership is positively related with voice behavior. Transformation leadership has positive influence on promotive voice behavior. Specifically, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration are all positively related with promotive voice behavior, except leadership charisma. Transformational leadership and its four dimensions don't have influence on prohibitive voice behavior.Thirdly, transactional leadership has positive impact on voice behavior. Transactional leadership is positively related with promotive voice behavior. Specifically, contingent reward is a good predictor of promotive voice behavior, but management by exception is not as well. Transaction leadership is not significantly related with prohibitive voice behavior, but management by exception has positive influence on prohibitive voice behavior.Fourthly, laissez-faire leadership has negative impact on employees'voice behavior. Specifically, laissez-faire leadership is negatively related with promotive voice behavior, but doesn't have significant influence on prohibitive voice behavior.Fifthly, psychological empowerment mediates the relationship between transformational/transactional leadership and voice behavior/promotive voice behavior.Sixthly, exchange ideology negatively moderates the relationship of transformational/transactional leadership and voice behavior.The research method is empirical study, synthetically using paper analysis, questionnaire survey and statistical analysis. Through paper reading and analyzing and considering the reality in corporations, this research proposes its research model and hypothesis, and then survey about 200 employees and analyzes the data with SPSS 15.0 to find out the conclusions. In the end, the research concludes some suggestions for management practice according to the findings and points out the originality and limitation of the research.